With that reasonable if defiant stand, the governor said he wants the federal courts out of our prisons. He wants the state to again run things. He wants the billions spent in recent years to upgrade health care for inmates to instead go for education and child care and other priorities.

He sent state attorneys into federal court Monday to try to get lifted what many - among them obviously Brown - see as unrealistic demands by the court.

"There's no question that there were big problems in California prisons," he told reporters later. " ... After decades of work, the job is now complete."

Technically, he's wrong since the $900 million prison hospital being built in southeast Stockton - a key element of improved inmate health care - isn't complete.

But that hospital is an example of the kind of money California taxpayers are spending to make sure inmates have medical and mental health care many taxpayers don't have, vision and dental care among them.

Understandably, that reality is starting to wear thin. Whether taxpayer and state officials' irritation matters to the court is an entirely different question. Many court watchers say it won't.

California got itself into this bind over time. We went through a tough-on-crime period where our laws sent more and more people to state prison.

We built more prison cells, to be sure, evidenced by the 33 state lockups California operates. But we couldn't build cells as fast as we could fill them. There's only so much money and so much concrete.

That reality quickly resulted in serious overcrowding and a rapid and dangerous decline in health care for inmates. That's when the federal courts stepped in, prompted by inmate lawsuits.

Punishment is one thing. Cruel and unusual punishment is another, and it's on the grounds of that Constitutional prohibition the federal courts - including the U.S. Supreme Court, which can hardly be viewed as soft on crime - ordered the prison population cut. In addition, the courts demanded the state fix a prison health care system so lacking one inmate a week was dying because it was so bad.

The prison hospital being built in Stockton is one result. Another is a legislatively passed prison realignment program that diverts so-called low-level, non-violent offenders into county jails rather that state prison.

That has flooded county lockups statewide but reduced the prison population to about 150 percent of capacity. That's a huge improvement from 2006 when the system was operated at about twice its capacity, but it's still above the 137.5 percent threshold set by the court.

If the court order stands, and many legal scholars believe the judges will not budge, Brown warns of "outright early releases of thousands of inmates convicted of murder or other serious felonies."

"We can run our own prisons, and by God let those judges give us our prisons back," he stated. "We'll run them right."